Student recognized for coding skills

Taylor Calhoun is an aspiring engineer due to her display of talent in computer coding and building robots.

The Pine Bluff High School senior was a recent competitor in the Pine Bluff Branch NAACP Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technology and Scientific Olympics Program.

Calhoun was one of four students honored during an awards ceremony May 3 at Bethany Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Pine Bluff. The event celebrated finalists who competed in the local ACT-SO Program. She was presented with a silver medal in the category of STEM/Computer Science as well as a monetary gift. Mayor Vivian Flowers recognized her with a certificate of achievement.

ACT-SO, a youth initiative of the NAACP, is an academic Olympics program that supports and highlights student achievement. It has been around for nearly 50 years and is described as the largest academics program in the country for African American high school students.

As a silver medalist, Calhoun did not compete in the national ACT-SO competition held in Charlotte, N.C. Maryann Lee, chair of the Pine Bluff Branch NAACP ACT-SO Program Committee, said, “We only take gold winners generally to the ACT-SO convention.”

She revealed that Calhoun was just five points from receiving a gold medal. She also shared that she will be mentored by Taylor Johnson, who works as a computer systems analyst at the mayor’s office. This will help prepare Calhoun for next year’s local and national competitions.

“The thing is that Taylor (Calhoun) is so brilliant,” Lee said.

“She taught herself coding and she created a computer program to run a robot,” Lee said, to which the audience of the awards ceremony applauded.

“The competition is very, very strong. You’re talking about kids who are already on their way to Yale and Harvard. Some of them will come down to (attend) Black colleges as well and they’re doing well. Next year, she is going to have the second part of her competition because she was supposed to have had a competition not only in computer science but also in engineering. The engineering part was the robot she was building,” Lee said.

Lee asked Calhoun to explain when she began pursuing computer science.

“I’ve been doing this since about the fifth grade when I started doing robotics with Miss Laura (Hildreth) and my mama (Shanta Calhoun) because she ran the local robotics program at our local high school around that time. So that’s how I really got started getting into robotics. I help build the robots,” Calhoun said.

In 11th grade, she joined a programming class taught by Frank Lyles, a math and computer science teacher at PBHS. At that point she started learning about programs such as Python and JavaScript, later creating a free advanced app to help students in her school track their grades and grade point averages.

“So I went and asked the teacher to help me with it … and I taught myself how to do programming in JavaScript,” Calhoun said, to which the audience applauded.

Hildreth, who works in the STEM Academy at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, spoke about Calhoun’s accomplishments.

“She is an engineer already. She’s been teaching for the last three years in the Verizon Innovative Learning Program,” Hildreth said.

Johnson added that Calhoun served as the captain of a robotics team in Pine Bluff.